A Bomb Built in Hell

by Andrew Vachss

  Back trackside, Wesley saw Mansfield in his usual spot, right against the rail. Iowa Boy was parked out for most of the race but closed like a demon and paid $16.80. From the way Mansfield tore up his tickets and threw them disgustedly into the air, Wesley concluded that the fucking loser was running true to form. It wasn’t really dark enough yet, but Wesley knew that Mansfield always stayed to the bitter end. The fool liked to bet the Big Triple in the ninth race. When he went into the men’s room, Wesley followed right behind, but as he had expected, it was impossible to work there.

  The crowd kept getting denser and more excited. Wesley hoped for a hotly contested race to really get the crowd moaning with that sexual roar—the one amateur sociologists mistake for greed—when the horses come around the paddock turn for the final time. The seventh race had a few real dogs running—a couple of hopefuls up from Freehold and a couple more on the way down. The tote board showed a possible payoff of almost a grand on a deuce if you coupled the right nags—there was a lot of money bet. Mansfield had gone to the $20 Exacta window, so he’d have something to think about this race for sure.

  This kind of thing would be better worked with a partner, but Wesley didn’t work with partners. He had been down twice on felonies and had noticed that not many men who worked in teams went to prison alone.

  Wesley pressed right behind Mansfield, but the target never noticed. He may have been a top professional on his home ground, but at the track Mansfield’s nose was wide open with a jones for Lady Luck.

  The crowd started screaming as soon as the pace car pulled away with the gate, and got louder and louder. A pacer named E.B. Time was trying to go wire-to-wire at 35-1, and the crowd was berserk. At the paddock turn, the roar swelled and all eyes were glued to the track. The horses thundered down the stretch, with the drivers whipping the nags and bouncing up and down in the carts as though the race hadn’t been decided in the Clubhouse hours before. Wesley slipped the icepick from the screwdriver pocket and held it parallel to his right leg, point down.

  Five horses hit the wire together as Wesley slammed the poison-tipped icepick deep into Mansfield’s kidney. The crowd screamed “PHOTO!,” straining forward to see the board.

  Mansfield slumped against the rail, which kept him from falling completely down as the weight of Wesley’s body pressed against him. The icepick was back in Wesley’s pocket a microsecond after doing its work. Wesley backed through the crowd, which was still trying to see who the winner was.

  He had already wiped the icepick and tossed it softly into the grandstand shadows when he heard the first tentative scream. He knew Mansfield had been dead before he hit the ground. The poison on the tip would make sure the sucker had no luck that night. A knife did more damage, but sometimes they got stuck in the victim. Wesley was out of the gate and already shifting the Ford into drive when he heard the sirens. By that time, thousands of losers were leaving too.

  4/

  The towel he had previously soaked with kerosene completely removed the decal-tattoo before he was out of the parking lot. Wesley drove the Ford back across the Triborough, but turned toward Queens instead of Manhattan. Just before the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, he pulled the car over to the side, where a red Chevy sat with its hood up and no driver in sight. Wesley got out of the Ford, quickly removed his jacket, stuffed both rings and the watch into the pocket, and left it on the front seat. He reached back in and turned off the Ford’s engine, pulling the key out of the ignition. He entered the Chevy, grabbed a new jacket from the front seat, reached in the pocket and put on the gold Accutron and the sterling ID bracelet he found there. The jacket fit perfectly.

  Wesley slammed down the hood of the Chevy and got back inside. The Ford’s ignition key started the Chevy immediately, and he pulled it off the shoulder and onto the road. As he glanced back in the rearview mirror, he saw the Ford cutting across traffic to the left-hand lane.

  Wesley took the BQE to Roosevelt Avenue and turned right, followed it to Skillman and took that street right across Queens Boulevard to the upper roadway of the 59th Street Bridge. He crossed the bridge and took Second Avenue all the way to the Lower East Side, and then slid into the maze of ugly narrow streets near the Slip.

  As he turned onto Water Street, he pushed the horn ring. No sound came from the horn, but the door of the garage opened quickly and quietly, closing the same way behind him as soon as he was inside.

  The old man stood in the shadows holding a sawed-off shotgun. As soon as he saw Wesley climb out of the car, he put the gun back into its rack. He was already wiping down the Chevy by the time Wesley closed the basement door behind him.

  Wesley walked up the back stairs without a sound, automatically checking the security systems as he approached his apartment. He reflected ruefully on how much all this protection had cost. The lack of obvious luxury depressed him sometimes, and he thought about the ugly chain of inevitability that had set him up in business for himself.

  5/

  Seventeen years old and facing a judge for at least the tenth time. Only this time Wesley wasn’t a juvenile and couldn’t expect another vacation in the upstate sodomy schools. It was the same old story—a gang fight, with the broken and bloody losers screaming “assault and robbery” at the top of their punk lungs. Cops always waited until the fights were over before moving in to pick up the survivors. They arrived with sirens and flashing lights, so that anyone even slightly disposed to physically resist arrest would have more than enough time to get in the wind instead. Wesley had taken a zip-gun slug in the leg, and couldn’t limp off quickly enough.

  It was the summer of 1952, before heroin was discovered as the governmental solution to gang fighting, and with the Korean War to occupy the attention of the masses.

  Wesley was waiting in the sentencing line—they had all pleaded guilty; Legal Aid didn’t know what to do with any other plea. He was standing next to a stubby black kid who had ended his engagement to a neighborhood girl with a knife. The black kid was in a talkative mood; he’d been this route before, and he wasn’t expecting anything but the maximum worst.

  “Man, the motherfucking judge throwin’ nickels and dimes like he motherfucking Woolworth’s!”

  Wesley kept his eyes straight ahead and wondered if there was a way out of the courtroom. But even as his eyes flew around the exits and measured the fat-bellied bailiff, he knew he wouldn’t have any place to go but back to the block ... just to keep building a sin for himself, as he had been doing ever since he could remember. The State’s “training schools” hadn’t trained him to do anything but time. Prison was as inevitable in his future as college was for three other defendants he saw waiting: well-dressed young men, accompanied by parents, friends, and lawyers, who were awaiting disposition on a burglary charge. They’d cop probation or a suspended sentence. Wesley wondered why his gang always fought people just like themselves when it was really privileged weasels like those kids that they hated.

  The Legal Aid lawyer ran over, excited, his chump face all lit up. Probably worked a great deal for me to make license plates for twenty years, thought Wesley, who’d been “represented” by the same firm since he was a little kid. The lawyer grabbed him by the sleeve and motioned him to step over to the side.

  “Would you like to beat this rap completely?”

  “I already pleaded guilty, man.”

  “I know that; I know that ... but the judge is going to throw a Suspended at anyone over seventeen who agrees to join the Army. What do you say?”

  “How many years would I have to be in the Army?”

  “Four years, but—”

  “How much time will I cop with this beef?” Wesley interrupted.

  “With your record, I’d say five to fifteen.”

  “Sign me up,” Wesley told him.

  6/

  And it went just like that. The judge made a big, fat, stupid speech about the opportunity to serve your country, while Wesley wondered if the Army gave you time off for good behavior.
His next stop was a recruiting booth, where they finally removed the handcuffs.

  Basic training was at Fort Gordon. Wesley didn’t like the heat in Georgia and he didn’t like the loudmouth sergeant and he didn’t like the gung-ho clowns. But it wasn’t prison. When his unit got transferred to Fort Bragg for infantry training, conditions didn’t improve. But Wesley was already trained to do his own time and he didn’t have anyone to complain to anyway.

  He qualified Expert with the M1, the only non-hillbilly to do so. This was immediately noted and praised by the New York contingent, which had already clashed with the Southerners. But the city-breds were too used to fighting each other to mount any kind of sustained drive. Tension was generally discharged in beery brawls, with no one seriously injured.

  Wesley stayed away from all that, and hoped like hell he wouldn’t get shipped to Korea.

  7/

  Camp Red Cloud was right near the northern border and the scene of many of the war’s worst battles. Wesley was assigned there and attached to a special hunter-killer squad. Because he rarely spoke, he was considered stupid and therefore, according to Army standards, highly reliable. He became the team’s sniper; again, the only city kid to be so assigned.

  The only thing Wesley paid any attention to was his sergeant telling him that every time they went out on patrol, the zips were the only thing keeping him from coming back.

  The sergeant was a lifer and respected by everyone for his ability to make an excellent living in a lousy situation. Unfortunately, the sergeant didn’t realize what a good listener Wesley was.

  During a heavy firefight near Quon Ti-Tyen, Wesley’s company realized they were going down the tubes unless they retreated, fast. The ROTC lieutenant had already fallen, and the sergeant was in command. But the sergeant wasn’t thinking about retreat; he kept screaming at the men to advance.

  It only took Wesley a piece of a second to realize that it was the sergeant who was keeping him from returning to the safety of the base, and he pumped four rounds from his M1 into the lifer’s back with the same lack of passion that had served him during his time in a sniper’s roost.

  Nobody saw the killing; it was just another body in a whole mess of bodies. Wesley shouted “RETREAT!” at the top of his lungs. He was the last man to pull out, a fact which later won him the Bronze Star from a grateful government.

  8/

  Two months later, Wesley was hit in the leg with a ball bearing from a Claymore mine that wiped out the three men just ahead of him. Sent down to South Korea for surgery, he recovered perfectly— just in time to take advantage of an R&R in Japan.

  Wesley stayed away from the Japanese whores. He couldn’t understand how they could feel anything but hate for the American soldiers, and he knew what he would do if their positions were reversed. The crap games didn’t interest him either; gambling never had.

  He was sitting quietly in an enlisted man’s bar when four drunken Marines came in and started to tear up the place. Wesley slid toward the door. He was trying to get out when he was grabbed by one of the Marines and belted in the mouth. The Marine saw Wesley falling to the floor and turned his attention back to the general brawl ... Wesley came off the floor as fast as he went down and smashed a glass ashtray into the back of the Marine’s neck. At the courts martial, he couldn’t explain how the ashtray had gotten into his hand or why he had reacted so violently.

  9/

  Wesley pulled an Undesirable discharge, but, in consideration of his excellent combat record and his medal, he was simply separated from the service without stockade time added on. The first thing he did was to go visit the Marine in the hospital.

  The Marine was paralyzed from the neck down; he caught Wesley’s eye across the room. He was lying face up on a special bed, with tubes running out of his lower body into various bottles and machines. Wesley walked up close until he was sure the Marine could see him. They were alone in the semi-private room; the Marine’s roommate was getting physical therapy in the pool.

  “You know who I am?” Wesley asked, not sure yet.

  “Yeah, I know who you are—you’re the man I’m going to kill.”

  “You not going to kill anybody, cripple.”

  “Oh, it won’t be me, punk. But I got a lot of good buddies who know what you did to me.”

  Wesley grabbed the pillow from the next bed and held it tightly over the Marine’s face. It was strange to see a man struggle with only his neck muscles. It didn’t last long. Wesley replaced the pillow, pulled the Marine’s lids down over his bulging eyes, and walked quietly out of the hospital.

  Nobody saw him leave. The Marine was listed as suffocating to death in his sleep.

  10/

  Stateside, Wesley took the .45 he had smuggled back from Korea and went for a walk late Saturday night. He entered the liquor store on Tenth Avenue and 21st Street and showed the clerk the piece. The clerk knew the routine and emptied the cash register even as he was kicking the silent alarm into action, but Wesley was out the door with the money before the police arrived.

  He found a hotel on 42nd Street near Eighth and checked in with his military duffel, his gun, and $725 from the holdup. A few hours later, the room’s door opened—Wesley grabbed for his pistol, but the shot that blasted the pillow out from under his face froze him.

  On the way out of the hotel, Wesley looked at the desk clerk, very carefully. The clerk was used to this; as a professional rat, he was also used to threats of vengeance from everyone who walked past him in handcuffs.

  But Wesley didn’t say anything at all.

  The night court set bail at ten thousand dollars, and the judge asked if he had any money for a bondsman. Wesley said, “I’ve got around seven hundred dollars,” and the arresting officer called him a smart punk and twisted the handcuffs hard behind his back.

  11/

  Wesley sat in the Tombs for two weeks until his “free” lawyer finally appeared. In what sounded like an instant replay of years ago, the lawyer told him that a guilty plea would get him about ten years behind his record, and all that. Wesley said okay—a trial was out of the question.

  On the way back from the brief talk with his lawyer, Wesley was stopped by four black prisoners who blocked his path.

  “Hey, pussy! Where you goin’?”

  Wesley didn’t answer—he backed quickly against the wall and wished he had his sharpened bedspring with him. He watched the blacks the way he had watched North Koreans. They were in no hurry—guards never came onto the tier anyway.

  “Hey, boy, when you lock in tonight, I goin’ to be with you. Ain’t that nice?”

  Wesley didn’t move.

  “An’ if you don’t go for that, then we all be in with you ... so I don’t want no trouble when I come callin’, hear?”

  They all laughed and turned back to their cells. Wesley walked carefully to his own cell and reached for the bedspring under his bunk. It was gone.

  Every night the doors to the individual cells were automatically closed by electricity. Wesley just sat and thought about it for a couple of hours until supper was over. He refused the food when the cart came by his cell and watched the runner smile knowingly at him. The smile convinced Wesley it wouldn’t do any good to ask for another shank to replace the one stolen from him.

  At 8:30, just before the doors were supposed to close, the four men came back. The biggest one, the talker, came forward with a smile.

  “Okay, sweetheart, decision time. Just me, or all of us?”

  Wesley looked frightened and defeated—he had been practicing in his scrap of mirror for an hour.

  “Just you,” he said, voice shaky.

  The other three slapped palms with the biggest one, mumbled something about “seconds,” and ambled off, laughing. They were about fifty feet down the corridor when the cell doors started to slowly close. Wesley knelt down before the big man who unzipped his fly and stepped toward Wesley ... who sprang forward and rammed his head and shoulders into the bigger man’s stomach
like a spear. They both slammed backwards into the cell wall, and Wesley whipped his knee up, trying to drive it into the big man’s chest right through his groin. The big man shrieked in pain and slumped and Wesley’s hands were instantly around his throat, thumbs locking the Adam’s apple. Just before the cell doors closed, Wesley stuffed the man’s head into the opening, his hands turning chalk-white with the strain. The three others raced back but were too late; they could only watch as the steel door crushed the big man’s skull as easily as if it were cardboard. Their own screams brought the guards, clubs up and ready.